James Blaylock - Homunculus

“Something stolen?” asked St. Ives, a rhetorical question, given the debris on the floor and the open window.

“Aye,” gasped the Captain, reeling toward a chair. But he hadn’t sat for more than a few seconds before he was up and through the door, bursting into Kraken’s empty room with a shout. Silence met him.

“Kraken gone!” cried St. Ives.

“The scoundrel!” shouted the Captain.

“Perhaps,” said Godall passionlessly, “Kraken himself has been the victim of this thief. Let’s not leap to conclusions.”

“Of course,” said St. Ives. “I’d bet on the man with the chimney pipe hat here — the one who was after the plans to the engine. I ran afoul of him myself recently. I’d bet he’s sneaked in through the casement, robbed the Captain’s sea chest, and done Kraken a mischief while Drake waylaid us in the shop; that’s the ticket.” St. Ives stroked his chin, squinting at nothing. “But why should this man necessarily be in league with Drake?” He addressed the question to no one, but Godall answered.

“Drake owns the house in Wardour Street — one among many. Your disguise, by the way, was a bit on the transparent side. It was me that you bumped into after you’d got hold of the clock.”

The captain interrupted the exchange by raging back into the room waving the almost empty whisky bottle that he’d found under Kraken’s bed. “This is all stuff!” he cried. “The man’s made off with… with my property, and no mistake. There was no man in a hat — not here anyway, kidnapping and robbing and clattering about under our noses. No, sir. Kraken’s made away with the goods, and there’s no use making up tales.”

“What goods?” asked St. Ives innocently. “Perhaps we can recover them.”

The Captain fell silent and collapsed into an armchair, precipitating a little cloud of dust. He buried his face in his hands, his anger apparently having fled in the face of St. Ives’ question. The Captain looked up at his congregated friends, started to speak, glanced at Jack, and shook his head. “Leave me to think,” he said simply, and slouched deeper into his chair, suddenly tired and old, his face lined with a hundred thousand sea miles and the weather of countless storms and suns.

Thunder rattled the casement, and the party gathered coats and hats and silently made ready to bend out into the road, awash now with the downpour. Jack and Keeble had only to cross Jermyn Street to shelter, but St. Ives and Godall had a longer journey. The muffled chiming of a clock could be heard through the pelting rain — two doleful peals that announced, more than anything else, the certainty that hansom cabs would long since have ceased to run, and that the walk, for St. Ives at least, would be a long and sodden one. The Bohemian Cigar Divan lay some half mile to the northeast, and the Bertasso in Pimlico some three miles to the southeast, but for six blocks or so, Godall and St. Ives walked together down Jermyn toward Haymarket. Neither was satisfied with the half-finished meeting. Things were hotting up at such a rate that action of some sort seemed to be called for. Biweekly meetings over cigars and ale would avail them little.

St. Ives knew almost nothing of Godall, who was a friend, after all, of Captain Powers, and a fairly recent friend at that. But he was very apparently enmeshed in the Narbondo-Drake business, for reasons St. Ives couldn’t entirely fathom. Why, in fact, was Captain Powers so thoroughly caught up? Why had Narbondo been seen lurking outside the smoke shop, if indeed he had? Mightn’t he as easily have been watching Keeble’s house, on the advice, possibly, of Kelso Drake? It was a muddle. St. Ives longed to be back in Harrogate, in among his scientific apparatus, consulting the staid and learned Hasbro, losing himself in matters of physics and astronomy. He could almost smell the steel chips and hot oil of the workshop of Peter Hall, the little Dorchester blacksmith who constructed the shell of the riveted spacecraft. There were too damned many distractions in London, all of them chattering for attention.

Just that afternoon had come a note from the Royal Academy. On the strength of his knowledge of Birdlip and his friendship with the uncommunicative William Keeble, St. Ives was invited to participate in certain programs involving the study of Birdlip’s amazing craft, which had been sighted over the Denmark Strait far up into the thin air of the stratosphere, swinging toward Iceland on a course that would sweep it once again over Greater London. Balloon expeditions were being readied in Reykjavik. There was some reason to suppose that the blimp would ultimately descend, perhaps land, in the following weeks. It might — who could say? — simply fall onto London rooftops like a spent balloon. The professor’s particular knowledge might be useful. And didn’t he know the toymaker William Keeble? Couldn’t he, perhaps, use his influence… Coercion is what it was. Here was an offer. St. Ives was to drop his work, lock the doors of his laboratory, send Hasbro to Scarborough on holiday. And in exchange, the Royal Academy would blink the ignorance and scientific prejudice out of their eyes, clean their spectacles, and agree to consider him something more than a lunatic eccentric. Why couldn’t a man just go about his work? Why must he always be meddled with? Who were all these people and what legitimate claim had they on his time? None whatsoever. The answer was clear as Whitefriar’s crystal, and yet hardly a day went by but what some new mystery, some complaint, some request arrived by post, some odd man in a chimney pipe hat peered in the window at you, or some long lost Kraken appeared from an alley and stole an unidentifiable trifle from a friend on the most rainy, miserable night imaginable — a night that had no business showing its face in the spring, for God’s sake.

Water ran from the brim of his felt hat like a beaded curtain and soaked his overcoat until it hung heavy as chain mail. And just when it seemed that the rain was letting up and the shadows of recessed doorways in the houses across the street began to solidify out of the mists, there was a bang and a crash as lightning lit the rooftops and ripped to bits whatever forces had attempted to subdue the weather. Wind tore along the street, whipping the tails of St. Ives’ coat and sending a chill through him that anticipated a lancing deluge from the starless heavens. The two men bounded as one into the doorway of a dark house where the wind and wet, at least, were powerless to follow.

“Deadly night,” said St. Ives blackly.

“Mmm,” responded his companion.

“What do you suppose Kraken stole?” asked St. Ives. “Not that it’s my business entirely — although I have a sneaking suspicion it will become so. It’s just that the Captain seemed so peculiarly… devastated by it. It’s a side of him I hadn’t seen.”

Godall lit his pipe in silence, his tobacco, pipe, and equipment miraculously dry. St. Ives didn’t bother to look at his own. Some day soon — after the successful launching of the starship — he’d set about developing a method to maintain the suitability of his smoking apparatus in even the most hellish weather. There would then be one thing in his life that was a certainty, a constant, that the forces of weather and chaos couldn’t make a hash of.

“I’m not at all sure how you’ve managed to keep your tobacco and matches dry,” said St. Ives, “but my own are muck.”

“Here, my good fellow,” responded Godall graciously, offering his open pouch. “Thank the Captain. It’s his blend. Superior to any of my own, too.” The two men passed matches and tampers back and forth, speaking in low tones and watching the rain roar down in an undulating, opaque curtain, looking for all the world as if the gods were shaking out a cosmic sheet in the roadway.